As road traffic has continued to increase at rates greater than increases in road capacity, the effects of increasing traffic congestion have had growing deleterious effects on business and government operations and on personal well-being. Accordingly, efforts have been made to combat the increasing traffic congestion in various ways, such as by obtaining information about current traffic conditions and providing the information to individuals and organizations. Such current traffic condition information may be provided to interested parties in various ways (e.g., via frequent radio broadcasts, an Internet Web site that displays a map of a geographical area with color-coded information about current traffic congestion on some major roads in the geographical area, information sent to cellular telephones and other portable consumer devices, etc.).
One source for obtaining information about current traffic conditions includes observations supplied by humans (e.g., traffic helicopters that provide general information about traffic flow and accidents, reports from drivers via cellphones, etc.), while another source in some larger metropolitan areas is networks of traffic sensors capable of measuring traffic flow for various roads in the area (e.g., via sensors embedded in the road pavement). While human-supplied observations may provide some value in limited situations, such information is typically limited to only a few areas at a time and typically lacks sufficient detail to be of significant use.
Traffic sensor networks can provide more detailed information about traffic conditions on some roads in some situations. However, various problems exist with respect to such information, as well as to information provided by other similar sources. For example, data obtained from networks of traffic sensors may be inaccurate and/or unreliable for various reasons, which greatly diminishes the value of the data provided by the traffic sensors. One cause of inaccurate and/or unreliable data includes traffic sensors that are broken, and therefore provide no data, intermittent data, or data readings that are incorrect. Another cause of inaccurate and/or unreliable data includes temporary transmission problems in data from one or more sensors, resulting in intermittent delivery, delayed delivery, or no delivery of data. Furthermore, many traffic sensors are not configured or designed to report information about their operational status (e.g., whether they are functioning normally or not), and even if operational status information is reported it may be incorrect (e.g. reporting that they are functioning normally when in fact they are not), thus making it difficult or impossible to determine if data provided by the traffic sensors is accurate.
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide improved techniques for obtaining traffic-related information and rectifying errors in the obtained information, as well as to provide various additional related capabilities.